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Hasidic Village Has Few Ways to Get Own School District

With New York State lawmakers reluctant to make a fourth attempt to create a special school district for the handicapped children of Kiryas Joel, its leaders have been looking for other ways of sustaining the school district.

Two weeks ago, school district officials in Kiryas Joel, an upstate Hasidic village, wrote a letter to Dr. William J. Bassett, the State Education Commissioner's representative for Orange and Ulster Counties, asking him to create a special district for them by resorting to a musty law that has not been used in 80 years. But today, sensing little enthusiasm for such a gambit, they called Dr. Basset and withdrew the request.

''If the response was going to be negative, why go ahead with it?'' said Abraham Weider, the village's Mayor.

The request was an indication of the village's growing desperation after the State Court of Appeals on May 11 declared unconstitutional the third effort by the Governor and the State Legislature to create a special public school district for the village's disabled children.

The village's only remaining hopes seem to be a reversal of the Court of Appeals decision by the United States Supreme Court or the increasingly slim possibility that the state will make one more quixotic attempt to create a Kiryas Joel district that can satisfy the courts.

The first attempt came in 1989, when Kiryas Joel, whose 15,000 residents are members of the Satmar Hasidic sect, successfully petitioned the State Legislature to create a public school district just for it, contending that its disabled children, who wear distinctive religious garb, were exposed to ridicule when they attended neighboring public schools to receive government-financed services related to their disabilities. The 1989 law was declared unconstitutional as amounting to a favor for a single religious group. Subsequent attempts by the state in 1994 and 1997 to pass laws that avoided the favoritism problem while creating a special district were also found to be unconstitutional.

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The latest Court of Appeals decision, rejecting the 1997 law, has forced Kiryas Joel to take the case to the United States Supreme Court, which may choose not to hear it.

The Court of Appeals gave Kiryas Joel until June 25 to get a preliminary decision from the Supreme Court.

Mayor Weider met with state lawmakers in recent weeks and was told that they were reluctant to draft a fourth law to create a special district for Kiryas Joel when all three previous laws were found unconstitutional. The lawmakers told him that they preferred to wait for the Supreme Court ruling.

As a result, Mayor Weider decided for a time to rely on Section 1504 of the State Education Law, a provision that is more than 100 years old and has not been used in 80 years, according to state officials. The statute allows certain state education officials, like Dr. Bassett, to organize a school district ''whenever the educational interests of the community require it.''

In an interview today, Dr. Bassett said he was not inclined to create a district for Kiryas Joel because he did not feel comfortable resorting to an arcane law that would be subject to the same challenges that have led the courts to strike down the state's explicit Kiryas Joel statutes. He then revealed that this afternoon, Kiryas Joel's school superintendent, Dr. Steven Benardo, called him and said he was unofficially withdrawing the request.